The effectiveness of therapeutic agents in a patient can depend to a great degree on the therapeutic agent's accessibility to the area of a patient's body to be treated. Therefore, it is highly desirable to accomplish homogeneous distribution of a therapeutic agent within a body space to be treated in order to effectively, efficiently and quickly therapeutically treat the target area. Conventional methods for introducing therapeutic agents to localized areas of the body for treatment provide if at all for only limited homogeneous distribution of the agent.
Dissolution of solids is effectively enhanced by stirring or agitating the solvent within a medium. Agitation permits homogeneous distribution of the agent throughout the medium and in the case of dissolving solid materials in a solvent such agitation increases the rate of dissolution possible with a minimal amount of solvent being used. The use of agitation enhances delivery of therapeutic agents to the desired specific site of action within the human body has obvious practical problems as would be known to those skilled in the art. It is therefore highly desirable to provide a method for distributing therapeutic agents in a localized area of a patient's body to facilitate homogeneous distribution and to improve the efficiency and rate of dissolving undesirable solids that may be in a localized area of a patient's body by a practical and safe method of in vivo agitation.
A good example of the present inability to facilitate distribution of therapeutic agents within the human body is the method conventionally employed for the dissolution of gallstones in vivo by a solvent such a mono-octanoin A conventional method for in vivo gallstone dissolution is to introduce by simple perfusion a solvent such a mono-octanoin into a localized area of the patient's body where the gallstones to be dissolved are located such as in the biliary tract. Conventionally, the perfusion of the solvent such as mono-octanoin for up to three weeks may be required to fully dissolve cholesterol gallstones in the biliary tract. It is postulated that such dissolution could be accomplished more effectively and quickly by improving the distribution of the solvent by agitation in vivo.